E for All 2008: Interview with Joseph Olin, President of The AIAS

JW: They feel a little over prepared, then.
JO: I think it’s great. The museum curator’s job is to try to filter through and look for things of significance that go to the public volume of the artistic realm. With game art, it’s the same thing. There are certain things that are worth saving and preserving. Over time, we’ll see if those were the best decisions or not, but at least we’ll have some sort of public record and public archive of great work over a period of time. The fact that it comes from the process of making games in interactive entertainment is that, that is what it is for. There’s a whole part of the LACMA that talks about print making from the turn of the century. There were Toulouse Lautrec, basically created ads. That’s how he paid his rent or his wine bill. Moulin Rogue. Those are good things. Luckily, our game makers don’t need to do that.

JW: So when they’re exhibited, are they shown the same way we see them downstairs? With the game listed?
JO: For the most part, we do. We always give credit to the artist, we talk about the title that it is from. We are looking at ways to make it more of an interactive exhibit. Because in some cases when they take the digital file and turn them into prints, they change. What you see on screen isn’t necessarily the same as what the final output is. Not that it is bad, it is just that it is different. And the artists themselves are like “It’s like a having a newborn child.” But we say “it’s your work,” and they respond “but the textures are so different and the depth is different; the black is different.” It is because they are creating digitally for the most part. We have some screenshots for a couple years and we’ve had models, but for the most part, these are scrapbook digital composited images with 3-4 people working on them and it is just so different to see them flattened out into a print. We’re also thinking about having the games from where the images come from on display when we go outside of the game world and into the general world just to get some context.

JS: Yeah, as I was browsing, it was exciting to see the games I recognized, but there were some of them that I had no idea about what game it was from.
JO: Right. Henry Hatsworth was just announced. There are images that haven’t necessarily been put into a game yet.

Puzzle World Twilight, by Jay Epperson, from Henry Hatsworth and the Puzzling Adventure

Continued on page 3.

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